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See How Your Representative Voted on the Ryan/Murray Tax & Spend Budget Here!

The House, as expected, voted to pass the budget deal reached by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), by a margin of 332-94. 62 Republicans, and 32 Democrats, voted against the measure. You can see how your representative voted HERE.

This budget, an amended version of H.J.Res. 59, would spend $63 billion more than the spending caps established in 2011, raise fees on air travel and customs, and contains a provision that will make it more difficult for senators to stop spending and tax hikes in the future. All this in exchange for a supposed deficit reduction of just over $20 billion over ten years.

Paul Ryan clings to those promised savings. Yet, history has been pretty clear that when you trade immediate spending for future cuts, those future cuts have a way of never arriving. The recent Vice Presidential hopeful also gloats that this bill contains no tax hikes. Now he's just arguing semantics. The bill collects billions in new fees from consumers so that the government can feed its spending addiction. By pretty much any measure, this is bad policy.

The fight moves on to the Senate, where the future of this spend and tax deal is far from certain. Already a number of Republican senators, including top leaders McConnell and Cornyn, have come out against the bill. Presuming that the Democrats are able to hold their membership in support, they still need at least five Republicans to get them to the 60 votes needed to pass this ridiculous plan.

You can take action to urge some of the less reliable Republicans to hold their ground by voting against cloture on the budget deal HERE.

The Senate voted today to end debate on the budget deal reached by Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Senator Patty Murray (D-WA). This tax-and-spend deal blows the top off of the budget caps set back in 2011, and raises taxes (or, if you prefer, fees), while claiming to reduce the deficit over ten years with mostly phony cuts that will likely never materialize. With the cloture vote passed, the Democrats can now pass this deal with a simple majority.

Tonight, both the House and Senate voted on a Continuing Resolution that funds our government through January 15th of next year. This deal also raises the debt ceiling through February 2014, and requires that both chambers go to conference on passing a budget resolution.

Last week, Republicans in the House of Representatives, under great pressure from their constituents, came together and passed a Continuing Resolution (CR) to fund the federal government, but which disallowed any funding for ObamaCare. This afternoon, Republicans the U.S. Senate betrayed their House colleagues and their constituents by voting to send the CR back the House with funding for ObamaCare.

Today, the House Republican leadership pushed through a new version of the Farm Bill, just a few weeks after an earlier version of the bill failed spectacularly on the floor. It succeeded in passing, 216-208, attracting the majority of Republicans in spite of the fact that it contained no reforms at all that actually improved the bill or reduced its abundance of waste and corporate welfare. You can see the roll call vote HERE.

Today, the House of Representatives voted on the so-called "Farm Bill", H.R. 1947. This bill, which is 80% food stamps and 100% fiscally irresponsible, failed 195-234. FreedomWorks is scoring NO votes on this bill on our online Congressional Scorecard.

After several weeks of deliberation, the Senate has finally passed its version of the Farm Bill. FreedomWorks strongly opposes this bill - you can read our Key Vote HERE. Among the "accomplishments" of this bill:

Last night, the Senate voted to pass the so-called Marketplace Fairness Act (S. 743) and send it to the House. This bill allows states to band together to form a sales tax cartel under which a business which sells products online must collect taxes for states where their goods are being shipped. There are a multitude of problems with this bill – it is potentially unconstitutional, it raises taxes, it will harm startup businesses online, and it fundamentally changes the way that taxes can be collected.

Last Friday, the Senate voted on dozens of amendments to their budget resolution before eventually (narrowly) passing the budget itself. This frenzy of amendments, known as a "vote-a-rama", gave many Senators a chance to force their colleagues onto the record on many key issues that have not come up for a vote in the Senate in years.Among the most important (and revealing) votes were on Medicare reform, internet sales taxes, ObamaCare repeal, carbon taxes, and Senator Rand Paul's budget plan.

Today the House of Representative voted to pass a $1.126 trillion Continuing Resolution (CR) without any extended debate and without allowing any amendments to be offered. This was a tremendous abrogation of regular order in the budget process which has been repeated multiple times over the years, and a sign that the leadership in Congress remains unconcerned about the tremendous deficit spending that has lead to our astonishing $16.6 trillion in debt.